After four weeks straight of packing salmon on the F/V Alaskan Girl, captain Brannon Finney jumped on a flight to Petersburg, Alaska, for a wedding. The next morning she woke to a concerning 91 notifications on her phone.
Messages, photos and videos flowed in: her all-female-crewed fishing boat, docked in Bellingham, was charred and water-logged. No one was injured, but the insurance assessor eventually estimated damages to be between $400,000 and $500,000.
“When the fire happened, everyone told me that our season was done,” Finney told Cascadia Daily News in December.
Now, several months after the blaze, Finney is celebrating salvaging the season — and finding new opportunities among the wreckage.
Leading an all-women operation
Finney, 37, got started in the male-dominated fishing industry walking the docks for a seine fishing job in Alaska to pay for college. But pursuing a degree in foreign politics ultimately wasn’t a good fit.
“So, instead of focusing on fishing to pay for school, I began fishing to pay for more fishing,” Finney said.
Finney’s first boat was a small 16-footer with a 75 crab pot permit. She traded that up for bigger permits and eventually sold those to purchase the F/V Alaskan Girl.
“If you’re going to be bossy, you kind of need to be the boss,” said Finney, who has captained her own boat for eight years.
Finney pointed out that it was a lot more difficult for a woman to break into the fishing industry 20 years ago than it is today. So, when she took the helm, she decided to have only women on her boat, giving them a chance to learn the trade and a place to be themselves.
“I don’t feel like you need to pack away your femininity in order to be successful in this industry,” Finney said, noting there is an entire manicure box in the wheelhouse of the F/V Alaskan Girl.
Fire ravages vessel
As the sun rose on Oct. 27, the 68-foot boat floating in Squalicum Harbor was scorched and its captain was more than 700 miles away.
Petersburg is a 12-hour milk run flight from Bellingham, stopping at four different airports on the way. But that Sunday, Finney was forcibly bumped from the overbooked flight.
Desperate to get back and assess the damage herself, she chartered a float plane to Ketchikan to catch another Alaska Airlines flight to Bellingham.
“All I was concentrating on was like, how am I going to solve this problem so that we can salvage the season for us and everybody else,” Finney said.
The F/V Alaskan Girl was acting as a packer for the season, which means her crew picks up salmon from the fishermen who caught the fish and delivers them to the processors. Finney explained that without the boat there to buy the salmon, the fishing boats wouldn’t have an outlet for their catch.
While Finney and her crew scrambled to repair F/V Alaskan Girl, they were missing two openers for the northern Hood Canal tribal gillnet fleet.
“I was so heartbroken to not be there, because they don’t get a lot of opportunity to fish,” Finney said. “Four days for three weeks is all they have to gillnet.”
Finney missed the first week of fishing but said she was able to arrange another packer boat to be there in her place.
During that time, she and the crew put in 18–20 hour days, removing two dumpsters of debris, pumping out seawater from the fire suppression effort and trying to make the boat liveable.
“This wasn’t a tragedy, but it could have been if it wasn’t for the quick action of Bellingham firefighters,” she said. “I’m extremely grateful to them for saving my boat and quite possibly my crew’s life.”
Once the boat was deemed safe by the Coast Guard and other regulators, Finney and her crew headed out.
“We limped through the first opener,” Finney said, noting that parts of the boat were still charred and there was no electricity or running water in some of the living quarters.
Redesign amid the ruin
Even in December the damage from the fire, thought to have started from a chest freezer outside, was evident.
“The storm that night is thought to have contributed to the failure of the freezer and subsequent ignition of surrounding materials,” Finney said.
Finney explained that entire first floor will be a gut job — but with that, a new opportunity.
Having early teenage girls join the crew for ride-alongs to get exposure to the commercial fishing industry is an idea that Finney said has been percolating for a while. However, the F/V Alaskan Girl didn’t have enough dedicated space for them to sleep aboard.
That’s something Finney said she hopes can be changed with a redesign of the first floor.
“I think I’ll be able to have another berth in it, so now I can have the space to support having young women out and getting them involved in the maritime industry,” Finney said.
Isaac Stone Simonelli is CDN’s enterprise/investigations reporter; reach him at isaacsimonelli@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 127.
